Previews

Tenchu: Fatal Shadows

Spiffy:

Iffy:

No multiplay; no mission editor; graphics are dated.

These days, virtually no game -- regardless of genre -- gets released without at least some element of stealth gaming. (Okay, there haven't been any stealth-sports titles to date, but in a bizarre twist, real-life NHL owners decided that all of their players should remain hidden for the entire season.) In the pre-Splinter Cell days, though, there were only a couple of real ways for gamers to get their stealth on. You could throw an empty box over your head and Snake your way through the enemy or you could slink along the bamboo rooftops of feudal Japan and off your foes when they least expected it. If you were a fan of the latter, get ready to break out the grappling hook and the poison rice balls. The fourth installment of the Tenchu series -- the grandpapa-san of stealth gaming -- is about to hit these shores. And when it drops, look for it to make a lot more noise than either of its silent and deadly ninja heroines.

Sega's Tenchu: Fatal Shadows is set after the original game, before 2003's Wrath of Heaven, and way after the events in Tenchu 2: Birth of the Stealth Assassins (the timeline of the series' games is somewhat dyslexic). As a result, Rikimaru, the sword-wielding male lead of the series is a no-show. The game starts with Ayame discovering a village that has just been sacked and burned. While she's surveying the damage, she's spotted by ultra-nimble ninja, Rin, who mistakenly believes that Ayame is the one responsible for the carnage. The game evolves over a couple of different storylines that have you tackling levels as either the dual short-blade-carrying Ayame or as Rin, who isn't afraid to mix it up with just her fists and feet.

Rin decides to mock gravity.

As far as gameplay goes, if you've skulked around in any of the previous games, you'll be able to hop right into the shadows here. While the characters may have changed, the rules are still the same -- kill without being seen. It's not enough just to kill folks; you have to do it without warning and without attracting any attention. The cleaner and stealthier your techniques, the higher your score and ranking will be. And in the near-complete version I played, the scoring in Fatal Shadows seems even more finicky than in earlier games. A few times I thought I did a pretty good job of secretly wiping out the enemy only to earn the embarrassing title of "thug." Ideally, the scoring will be softened in the final version. In any event, helping you -- hopefully -- make the jump from "thug" to "ninja" is the on-screen meter from earlier games that helps you figure out how far away the enemy is -- and if you've been spotted by them.

In a lot of ways, this is shaping to be the most polished Tenchu yet. From a controls standpoint, it clearly outdoes its predecessors. The coolest new addition is the double stealth kill. In previous games, you were able to sneak up on one foe and take him out with a nifty stealth kill. The downside was that if there was another enemy around, your cover was blown and it would affect your score. Now, with proper timing, you can drop down on two enemies and take them each out with stealth kills. The graphics of these kills have been tweaked and have been made even more dramatic. You can simply lop someone's head off as Ayame does in her "Silent Scream" kill, or -- even cooler -- you can flip an enemy upside down while icing them and leave them standing on their head as Rin does in her neck-snapping "Falling Rock" kill. The addition of a quickie x-ray-style shot of whatever limb or joint is being wrecked is an added bonus to future assassins or med students.